‘Anthony has caught the buffalo!’

Unable to contain his excitement, one of the men shouted. In the darkness, his voice reverberated across the hillsides. It brought others trampling through the compound, and in a matter of minutes, the bushes around the well were cut down.

‘It’s normal that buffaloes fall into wells,’ Kuttachan remarked, shining his torch into the overgrown interior of the well. He pointed his gun into it. ‘Let’s kill it and then pull it up.’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ Anthony said, pissed off that his accomplishment in trapping the buffalo was not being met with sufficient appreciation. ‘If I can trap it in the well, I know how to bring it up also. Alive!’

Kuttachan noticed that the majority of the crowd agreed with Anthony, so he stood aside as though ready to watch the performance unfold. Some people went about organizing a pulley and strong ropes to use as nooses, while others began pelting the trapped animal with stones. A couple of people dragged big rocks over and chucked them into the well, enjoying the sound of them falling on the body of a living creature. Others threw in lit brush torches.

Eventually, two men armed with nooses and headlights were lowered carefully into the well, guided by the ropes tied around their waists and passed through the pulley. Advice poured in from the onlookers. Don’t step on the ground . . . Beware of snakes . . . They toiled in the darkness of the well for almost an hour before being pulled back up.

‘It’s the cow-buffalo,’ one of them said. There was a tinge of disappointment behind the satisfaction in his voice.

After a long time and a lot of effort, the men pulled the buffalo up, her forelegs, middle of the body and hindquarters noosed, on to planks laid over the mouth of the well and on to solid ground. Her body was covered in bruises, and blood leaked from her head where the horn had broken off. As soon as Anthony tied a rope around her neck and removed the nooses from her body, people set upon her, beating her with whatever sticks they could find, and cruelly poking the animal in her private parts.

At that precise moment, an astonishing thing took place, something that the assembled crowd would remember till the end of their days, and which would become part of the local folklore. At first, they thought that a storm was rushing towards them from the darkness of the coffee plantation, but before they could wonder whether they should take shelter or get drenched, something dark and frighteningly loud charged through the crowd. Some lost their footing and fell into the well, while others were tossed away. The gaslights and torches that had lit up the compound went up into the air before falling on the ground and extinguishing. Anthony was thrown into the thorny tangle of a thudali bush, and by the time he regained his footing and his composure, the bull-buffalo and his rescued companion were three compounds away. Torch in hand, Kuttachan was seen running after them, cursing at the top of his voice.